The Last Stop On The Number Eight

On a Saturday she gets on the number eight and rides it to the end.

Not to go anywhere. There is nothing at the end of the number eight except a turning circle, a shelter with a timetable in a frame, a green with a stand of poplars along one side, and a driver who gets out for eight minutes and then gets back in. She sits by the window on the way out and on the same side coming back, which means she sees one half of the route twice and the other half never, and she has never once minded.

Ninety minutes, more or less. She has done it something like forty Saturdays.

She is not in trouble. That is the part I want to be careful with, because a person hearing this from outside reaches for words like lost, and she is not lost. She gets up, she goes to work, she eats properly, she is well and she is well liked. Nothing is wrong.

She is simply not anywhere.

For nineteen years she held a post. It was not a job anybody named or thanked her for, but it was a post with duties and hours and a whole body of expertise behind it, and the duties were these: know the mood in the front room within four seconds of coming through the door, get the small ones upstairs before it turns, put the telly up two notches at the right moment, and never once let the thing tip over. She was extremely good at it. It ran her Saturdays, her evenings, her holidays and the inside of her head.

Then she left, and the post came off her like a coat.

And what nobody warns you about is that it does not feel like freedom for a long while. It feels like being stood down from a post nobody ever named. There is no mood in her front room. Nothing needs keeping. The peace does not require a keeper, and so on a Saturday she rides out to a green she has no business at and rides back again, because at least a bus is a thing that goes somewhere.

Her mother is still in that house and rings on Wednesdays. Her father is a frightened man who never named what frightened him. Neither of them is a villain in this, and neither of those nineteen years was an apprenticeship. I am not going to tell you they were training you for something, because they were not training you for anything, and a woman who spent her girlhood watching a front room did not receive a gift, she paid attention because she had to.

You are safe here. If you are perfectly alright and you are also not anywhere, and there is a Saturday in your week with nothing in it and nothing to keep the peace around, then stay with me. I am not going to ask you what you are going to do about it.

A planting is not a plan

Isaiah calls them the planting of the Lord. Not the plan of the Lord, not the project of the Lord. A planting, which is a thing that happens to a tree on a day the tree has no vote in, in a field the tree did not choose, at a depth it was not consulted about. You are planted, and the planting was somebody else's decision entirely, and the Spirit has been saying that over ninety minutes of a bus route on forty Saturdays.

To give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, a robe of praise instead of a faint spirit. They shall be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.Isaiah 61:3

Look at what that verse hands out before it names anybody. A garland where the ashes were. Oil of joy where the mourning was. A robe of praise in place of a faint spirit. Three things given, and not one of them fetched by the person receiving them. You have a set of clothes on you that you never went and got, and His Spirit dressed you in them long before you had anywhere in particular to wear them.

Now the line everybody misreads, which is in Psalm 92. We hear it as though the flourishing came first and the planting was the reward for a good showing. The order on the page is the other way about: planted in the house of the Lord, and then they flourish in the courts of our God. Planted comes first and it is not the tree's achievement. You are planted before you are anything else, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over you waiting for one visible sign before He will use the word.

Drifting and placed can look identical from inside a bus window, which is what makes this hard. The difference is not in the view, and it is not in how the Saturday feels. It is in whose hand the thing is in, and Psalm 16 puts it in one hand and names it: the measuring lines have fallen for me in pleasant places, and You hold my lot in Your hand. You have a lot, and it is being held right now, and the Spirit is the one who knows which of those two words is true about you tonight, because He is the one doing the holding.

And that naming in Isaiah is not a nice wish somebody once had. It sits in the chapter Jesus stood up and read out in Nazareth, and when He had finished He rolled the scroll up, handed it back and said it was fulfilled that day, in that room, with people in it. You have been named by a word that got fulfilled out loud, and the Holy Spirit does not read it over you as poetry.

So no, I am not going to ask what you are doing with your Saturdays, and I am not going to hand you a direction dressed up as encouragement. The Spirit is not asking you to have a plan by September. He is standing on five words out of Isaiah 61, the planting of the Lord, and He is saying them over the poplars at the terminus and the shelter and the ninety minutes with nothing in them. You are not a woman with nowhere to be. You're a woman who has been put somewhere, and that holds while she is sitting perfectly still.